The Interdomain Setting of PlanetLab Nodes Suman Banerjee U of Wisconsin, Madison Timothy G. Griffin Intel Research, Cambridge UK Marcelo Pias Intel Research, Cambridge UK (extracts from a PAM 2004 presentation) PlanetLab Metting Cambridge UK May 14, 2004

Intel Research Global Research and Education Networks (GREN) Schematic is Highly Simplified! GREN contains over 1100 ASNs Abilene has 70 BGP neighbors, and 650 downstream ASNs

Intel Research Traffic between GREN nodes tends to stay on the GREN

Intel Research Mapping PlanetLab Hosts and Sites to GREN and Commercial Internet  So more than 70% of traffic between PlanetLab hosts is carried on the GREN (0.85 * 0.85 = ). Using 276 production hosts of Jan. 15, 2004 Notes: These results assume that research to research traffic is carried on GREN, which traceroute experiments seem to verify. Mapping used 20 BGP tables and associated host IP addresses with best match routes, which give originating ASN. Research ASNs were extracted from Abilene routing table (obtained from Route-Views). MOAS = multiple origin ASNs

Intel Research Geography  more about 60% of traffic between PlanetLab hosts is carried on the Abilene/Geant corner of the GREN (0.78 * 0.78 = ). LA = Latin America AP = Asia Pacific (including Australia) EMEA = Europe, Middle East, and Africa NA = North America

Intel Research A “Bad Triangle” … A HP Palo Alto B Intel Berkeley C Moscow State U A B C 257 ms 201 ms 4 ms

Intel Research … and its routing A B C RBNet AT&T Cable & Wireless CAIS Above Net Telefonica

Intel Research Look at all “triangles” r = a/(b+c) * (1 + (a – (b + c))) a = longest side

Intel Research Closer look at violators

Intel Research Observations  The majority of PlanetLab nodes currently sit in the GREN corner of the Internet. In fact, they largely sit in the Internet2/Dante corner of the GREN.  This has implications for measurement studies.  Forwarding paths between PlanetLab nodes are (currently) not as complex and convoluted as those on the “wide wide Internet”  The GREN has a large amount of network diversity that is currently not experienced by PlanetLab-PlanetLab traffic.